With the summer heat finally kicking in, about a week or two ago I relented and turned on the A/C. The temperature was routinely in the mid-80’s and the occupants of my aquariums were starting to sweat and pant.

Yesterday though, I decided I’d had enough of air-conditioner air. I don’t like the smell of it. So I shut it down and opened all the windows. It got me thinking though… where does air-conditioner air come from?

Does it get sucked in from outside, chilled down, then blown into the house? Or is it air that’s already in the house, chilled then just blown around inside?

I suspect it’s the latter… recycled air.

What would be neat, like for the next big thing in air-conditioning, would be this: Inside the A/C unit would be a little wormhole-generator, and a strong fan. And when you turn it on, what it does is, it opens up a wormhole to Antarctica, and the fan cranks up and starts pulling in icy-cold Antarctic air. Fresh, pure, and cold!

There’d be a filter or something so that any penguins or scientific researchers that got accidentally drawn in through the wormhole would be safely extracted and ejected to land in the drive-way, so as not to end up clogging up the duct-work.

That’s what I want in an air-conditioner. Fresh, pure, icy-cold Antarctic air.

Actually we could use the same mini-wormhole technology in refridgerators too! They’d go back to being iceboxes, but instead of getting our ice from a guy making weekly deliveries, whenever the icebox detected it was low on ice, it’d open up a little wormhole and suck a hunk of ice in from the Antarctic ice sheets.

There’s a lot of great ways this kind of technology could be used. Maybe in the winter, you turn a dial and redirect the wormhole to somewhere hot and suck in hot air? Or suck in a glob of hot magma from deep under the Earth’s crust, then just draw outside air in over the magma glob, heating the air that then heats the house.